How privilege rules over school funding

Government education won't get a fair go until we face up to some inconvenient truths.

By Kenneth Davidson

April 29, 2013 — 3.00am

The still-used Howard government model for dividing up education funding between government and non-government schools blatantly subsidises social privilege at the expense of public schools, which are increasingly becoming a residualised system for the poor who can't afford the alternative.

The response of supporters of this model speaks volumes for the hypocrisy used to confuse the debate.

The Gonski proposition being pursued by the Gillard government is this: the government system should be able to meet its responsibilities to provide a base- standard education for its student population - including a disproportionate share of those who are difficult and more expensive to teach because of their social and economic background, ethnicity, disability or geography. To do this on a level playing field with the non-government schools, the funding for under-resourced schools must be increased by $6.5 billion a year.

This is an inconvenient truth. Since the Whitlam government introduced open-ended funding for Catholic systemic schools, the middle class has been able to opt out of its responsibility to the public school system - a development which has been largely avoided in most other developed countries.

Those countries place restrictions on private schools' ability to use state aid in order to supplement fees and increase total resources above the standard set by government schools. In effect, the private schools operate as part of the public system.

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Australia's system of state aid for private education is unique. It avoids confronting what every educationalist understands, namely that beyond a certain point, the transfer of middle-class students from government to non-government schools impoverishes the students who remain in the public system.

It also undermines social solidarity at its most vulnerable point and promotes an ugly form of class consciousness.

Australia has one of the most privatised school systems in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - only 66 per cent of lower secondary students are enrolled in government schools, compared to the OECD average of 83 per cent.

Finland, with the highest proportion of students in government schools (96 per cent), also regularly tops the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in science, literacy and maths. New Zealand, Canada, South Korea and Japan also rate well according to the PISA tests.

Most OECD counties avoid the residualisation of their government schools by making it a condition of public funding that fees are prohibited or limited, so private schools, accepting state aid, can't be better resourced than government schools.

The countries that rate highest in terms of PISA focus their public resources on bringing the educational tail up to the average and, at least in the case of Finland, it is claimed that this has a positive effect on the performance of the brightest students.

It costs more to educate children from low socio-economic backgrounds and children with disabilities, but society is more than paid back from this additional investment as children who are ''at risk'' are given the tools to live an active and productive life.

Evidence presented to the Gonski committee by Professor Richard Teese from Melbourne University shows that meeting the education needs of the disadvantaged costs more, and the cost is greater where there is a critical mass of such students in a particular school. The Gonski committee accepted the view that government schools had reached that critical point.

According to Teese: ''Government schools are unmistakably the main provider for groups which are educationally disadvantaged and/or have special needs. The vast majority of low income (77 per cent), indigenous (83 per cent), disability (80 per cent) provincial (72 per cent) and remote/very remote (83 per cent) students attend government schools.''

These figures simply reinforce the wisdom of the aspirational classes to get their children out of the public school system, especially while the present system of funding effectively subsidises the exodus.

This migration to the private system is rationalised by some politicians using a range of arguments: the problem can't be solved by spending more money; the crisis is caused by the lack of quality teachers and principal autonomy; not to mention the malign influence of the teacher unions.

These convenient lies provide a salve to consciences of the middle class, who don't want to pay for a system they don't use. And those aspirational parents are aware that if the government schools were improved, there would be more students competing for university places and lucrative jobs.

After five years in government, federal Labor has finally entered this debate with the promise of $14.5 billion extra for ''at risk'' students over six years. Although this funding will be ''back-ended'' to the last couple of years - that is, government schools carrying the financial burden of educating ''at risk'' students will get virtually nothing in the first couple of years of Julia Gillard's plan.

Worse, instead of the funding being focused on the bottom quartile of the school population as measured by the socio-economic status (as recommended by the Gonski panel), the coverage is extended to the two bottom quartiles of the school population.

Why? So the non-government schools (mainly Catholic) that have virtually no students from the poorest quartile will be able to get in for their chop as well.

Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist at The Age. Email: kdavidson@dissent.com.au